Tina Hutchence: 'Michael and Tiger Lily were ripped from us in an instant'

When you lose a sibling in the most tragic of circumstances, life is never the same. For Tina Hutchence, the older sister of INXS frontman Michael Hutchence, the loss of her baby brother is still keenly felt more than 20 years later.

It hasn't just been the loss of Michael that haunts her, but of his daughter -- Tiger Lily, now 22 -- who was raised by her mother's ex-husband, singer Bob Geldof, and continues to reside in the UK.

Tina, 70, hasn't seen nor spoken to Tiger Lily since the summer just before her brother's death, nor did she get to see her immediately following Michael's death. And it's all she wanted.

"Because she was him," Tina tells 9Honey. "She's a piece of him. But that was denied to us. I felt especially bad for my mother; first her son, and then she's kept so far away from this little child that looks so much like him."

Tina didn't get to see her niece for the first time following her brother's death until the funeral, along with everybody else, and then not at all the rest of that week.

"Everybody dispersed, and when I asked about seeing her I was told that Paula [Yates, Tiger Lily's mother] had changed her number, that we weren't allowed to contact her," she says.

Following the funeral, Tina says her mother, Patricia, would watch Paula give interviews holding Tiger Lily, and send videos to her, and they both found it "very upsetting."

"Michael and Tiger were just ripped from us in an instant," she says.

"Over the summer I'd seen so much of her and I got so many photographs holding her. It was wonderful. She was such a lovely little baby, so easy going, so sweet... it was traumatic."

She and Patricia suffered further distress when they were denied custody of Tiger Lily following her mother's death in September 2000. Custody was instead given to Yates' ex-husband Bob Geldof.

Tina Hutchence has written a new about her brother, out today. (9Honey)

In fact, Patricia and Tina only found out Tiger Lily had become an orphan when her mother started receiving calls from the media.

A couple of hours after the news broke, Tina says Geldof called her and told her not to worry about Tiger Lily.

"She's right here, we're giving her a bath. We've got her nanny in," he said at the time.

Tina thanked Geldof and asked when she could see her niece. He told her to come and see her whenever she liked, or to call.

Tina did get to see Tiger Lily for a day and a night, joined by mother Patricia. They met up at a restaurant in London and Tina says Tiger Lily walked straight up to her, carrying a little photo book Tina had made for her.

"It had lots of photos of Michael when he was a little boy, and her cousins. Bob told me she'd carry it around everywhere," Tina says.

Tina and her mother spent a precious afternoon and evening with Tiger Lily, and it was during the visit that she told Geldof she was planning to pursue custody of her niece so the pair could raise her together.

"You could have knocked me over with a feather, honest to goodness. I mean, that was just insane to me," Tina says.

In the United States, custody of orphaned children is usually given to the closest blood relative, but this isn't the case in London.

"It just didn't go my way," Tina says.

Since then, Tina has only seen Tiger Lily twice, and has no contact with her today.

"She has two cousins in Australia that she has contact with," she says.

"I just think she's been told some bad things about me, because why would she not want to know about her father?

"It's partly why I wrote the book; I'm one of the last people who can really tell her what her father was about. My children were the only cousins who spent time with him."

'Michael and Tiger were ripped from us' (AAP)

She says she wants the now 22-year-old to know that her father was a "very loving man" with "such a great sense of humour".

"He wanted the best for her," Tina says.

"He was so happy when she was born. He was just over the moon... he was talented, but he was just a big love bug. He saw the good in people."

The book, Michael, is out today. In it, Tina writes about her beloved brother, from their time together as children when she helped raise him, to the moment she realised he was a superstar.

A nomadic life

Tina was 12 when Michael was born in 1960 - followed by Rhett in 1962 - to her mother, Patricia, and step-father, Kell.

"I had never done any baby-sitting before," she says, recalling the first time her parents left her in charge of baby Michael one evening when he was only a week old.

They'd hired a nurse to help Tina care for him, but next time she offered to mind her brother solo.

"I just took to it very easily, I found," she says. "I really enjoyed it. We moved around so much. It was stable for me, taking care of both boys. It was my comfort."

The family moved to Hong Kong when the boys were only young, before returning to Sydney in 1972. When his parents separated in 1976, they lived with Tina in California for a period of time before returning to Sydney, where INXS was formed.

INXS were the first Aussie band to achieve world-wide fame in the eighties and nineties. (AAP)

"I didn't like moving all the time because for me I was in a new school with the wrong uniform all the time," Tina recalls.

However, she says the boys, being so young, adjusted more quickly than she did. Michael, she recalls, was "such an easy child to rear" and "just happy to be alive."

"He loved anything and he loved to laugh and he loved his food.. .everything was a challenge and exciting for him," Tina adds. "He was just a really happy kid."

During their time in California following their parent's split, the siblings' relationship changed when Michael began helping Tina with her then-toddler, Brent, three.

Michael was a good baby-sitter; Tina recalls, "He'd just have the music blaring as I did when I was a teenager when he was little.

"I'd come home and he'd be trying to show Brent these moves that he'd seen at North Hollywood High because all the kids would dance."

From Christmas carols to rock God

It was a chance encounter that started Michael's professional career, although Tina recalls he had been writing poems for years - with many of them eventually being developed into the iconic song lyrics INXS became known for.

"Michael was writing very early and he didn't show us at first," she says.

"I didn't see his little book -- he'd have these books -- until he was about 14, and he came to live in the United States. I was really surprised.

"He was constantly reading... he called it his poetry, and I think that's how he thought of it until a chance meeting with Andrew Farris and it all just exploded."

It was with the Farris brothers -- Andrew, Jon and Tim -- that Michael formed INXS in 1977, along with Garry Beers and Kirk Pengilly.

Michael had already began his professional career as a child, singing Christmas carols for an advertising company in the US after mum Patricia was approached at a cocktail party.

An advertising executive asked if she had any young children and when she confirmed she did, he asked if they could sing. "Michael can carry a tune," Tina recalls her mother saying.

So Michael went into a recording booth and sang his way through his first gig. Tina says he was "tentative" at first but "did great," singing one song after the other.

"He obviously enjoyed it. He got paid US $50 for that. Not bad!" she says.

Tina and her brothers had a lot of music around the house growing up; she recalls, "My parents loved Ella Fitzgerald and Tony Bennett, so there was a lot of that ... and of course the Beatles were around when I was a teenager."

When INXS finally achieved their dream of playing at Wembley Stadium in London in 1991, in front of a crowd of over 70,000 people as part of the 'Guns in the Sky' tour, Tina knew her brother had become a superstar.

"I had just seen him a month before. He was in LA visiting... he never said a word," she says.

Yet she'd realised much earlier that the band was making an impact, during one of their trips to the United States. Tina, who was living there at the time, was stunned when she saw "the kids go crazy" at one of their concerts, and says her brother became another person on stage.

Tina loved watching Michael perform, recalling, "I'd be a little nervous... I was so proud. It was wonderful. I'd get up there and yell and scream and clap with all of them."

She says when it came to Michael's career, his main focus wasn't the fame, but the music.

"He had something to say in those songs. They got fairly political at times and that was the most important thing to him," she says.

"The idea of him being the front man, that wasn't his main goal. That was because he couldn't play an instrument; it just naturally happened and he got to enjoy it because he was telling people something."

A frustrated artist

By the early nineties INXS was starting to decline, especially in the wake of grunge bands such as Nirvana -- who Michael admired.

"It was very hard on Michael when he felt that the band was becoming irrelevant. He could not talk the other members [of INXS] into getting out of the eighties," Tina explains.

"It annoyed him. He had so much more to write. There was so much more they could do. It wasn't like he wanted to turn grunge or anything."

He told Tina the band were happy to "sit on their farms in Australia and wait for the next album", which, she says, is what led to his time alternate band Max Q.

Michael's life took a dark turn in 1992, when he was punched by a taxi driver while in Denmark with then-girlfriend, model Helena Christensen.

She feels her brother was suffering from the effects of a traumatic brain injury.

"He complained of headaches at first and he thought they'd just go away," Tina says of the time after the attack. Then he lost his senses of taste and smell.

"He was really worried. He talked about it often because he loved to cook, and he could no longer smell or taste when cooking, and it's part of the whole experience."

In 1996 when daughter Tiger Lily was born, Michael told his sister he "couldn't smell his own baby" - which "hit him harder" than anything else, Tina recalls.

As it had been four years since the attack, doctors had told the performer it would be unlikely for his senses to return. Sadly, they were right.

It wasn't until after Michael's death that the family learned he had, in fact, suffered the effects of a traumatic brain injury.

"His personality changed. He was not as easygoing as he would always be," Tina explains.

"Things were bothering him so much more and that was when he was residing in London, so the press were waiting for him everywhere. It was difficult."

Health issues and that custody battle

Tina says she and her mother were "very worried" during the time before Michael's death, and in particular when he became embroiled in then-partner Paula Yates' custody dispute with Geldof. The couple had three daughters together: Peaches, Fifi and Trixie.

"When he got together with Paula that was very difficult. It didn't matter that it was her divorce. He was there and he was already close to the children," she says.

INXS had been together for 12 years.

"It was very worrying for him and he didn't want to be caught up in that. He just wanted to go back to his home, to his villa in the South of France, and get away from it."

It was during his final tour when it all came to a head. Tina says Michael was battling health issues as well as carrying the emotional weight of missing his daughter and trying to support Yates as she fought for custody of her older daughters.

"It was difficult to go on tours after Tiger was born and he did not want to be on that last tour, the Elegantly Wasted tour," she says.

"It was something he said upfront, but he felt he owed it to the band. They were very insistent.

"He should never have been on that tour, that's what I feel. He was getting these calls from London, the 'perils of Paula', and he had to stop a couple of times and go back to London overnight and then come back and join the tour again.

"Why that tour wasn't cancelled, I have no idea ... There was a letter from their manager at the time, found in [Michael]'s belongings. She said, 'I'm worried about you, Michael.'"

Tina says she spoke to INXS band member Kirk Pengilly six months after Michael's death and asked if he'd noticed anything wrong with her brother during that tour.

She says Pengilly told her Michael "wasn't good", and she asked if they'd considered cancelling the tour.

"You hear all the time about bands postponing tours because somebody's ill, somebody has rehab, so why didn't INXS do that?" she muses.

"That disappointed me a lot. They had been together for 12 years and it seems like there should have been more respect there."

She says in his later years Michael began to feel irrelevant musically. (Getty)

The last time Tina saw Michael before his death was during his last summer when he visited her in LA in his month off between INXS's European and US tours.

"Before he arrived he called my mother and told her how unhappy he was and he didn't want to go on with this tour. He was worried about Tiger," she recalls.

Their mother was so concerned about Michael that she flew to LA to be with her son, staying in a hotel with him.

"There was something about the relationship that was hard to see and he was being pulled from all sides and he had told me the night before he left Los Angeles for Sydney, he told me he was trying to work something out for Paula," Tina says.

"He'd already organised for her to have a job here in radio and the children were going to be here for Christmas and he wanted to set up family in either Sydney or LA."

During that summer, Tina got to spend a lot of time with Michael and with Tiger, something she'll always be grateful for. -

however, she regrets missing another chance to see him again before he flew to Sydney, when he called her to invite her to a radio interview he was doing.

She was busy at the time and decided not to go, telling him they could have dinner the following week.

"You can't get that [time] back," she says.

She and mother Patricia were deeply concerned about Michael ahead of his death. (9Honey)

'It's just not a mystery anymore'

Of the night her brother died, Tina says we will never know exactly what happened.

"I do know that he reached out to a couple of people. He was so nervous because he was waiting for word from London," she says.

Tina now feels Michael was hiding the effects of his traumatic brain injury, perhaps out of concern about what people would think. She's since learned that many people with traumatic brain injuries take their lives.

"Michael's brain injury was a lot more serious than any of us knew and we didn't find that out until after he died because of the autopsy," she explains.

"I think he just snapped. He could not handle problems the way he used to. That was part of everything; somebody with a TBI [traumatic brain injury], usually they have trouble being in a room with a lot of people or in strange lighting.

"That was Michael's business, every night. It's just not a mystery any more when you know that."

The autopsy also revealed Michael was using Prozac at the time of his death; a treatment Tina says was common for people with brain injuries in the '90s.

"The doctor who kept prescribing it kept upping it. He wasn't seeing Michael. Michael would call from wherever he was and he [the doctor] would just stock the prescription for him," she adds. At the time of his death, Michael was taking 60 milligrams a day.

"It's so sad. I was certainly going to go first, not just my mother. It never ever occurred to me that Michael would do that, as unhappy as he was," Tina says.

Michael was struck by a taxi driver while in Denmark with then-girlfriend Helena Christensen. (AAP)

Learning the tragic news

Tina and her mother Patricia found out Michael had died when her brother Rhett called to break the tragic news. At the time Rhett was staying with their mother on the Gold Coast and she was in LA.

"The press started calling my mother, they were calling her at home. They were downstairs and she was in a security building. They would just push, push, push her buzzer," she recalls.

Tina says her mother saw something flashing across the TV screen, but Michael had just arrived in Sydney and she'd spoken with him the day before.

She had spoken to her mother earlier that day and it was evening time in LA when she received an urgent phone message from Rhett: "Call me. Don't talk to anyone. Don't answer your phone. Just call me now."

Tina says she picked up the phone as her then-partner turned the TV on to news channel CNN.

"Rhett said, 'Darling, can you sit down or something. Michael's dead,'" she recalls.

Tina looked at the TV screen and saw the words: "Michael Hutchence dead at 37."

"It was so surreal ... it was just impossible. I said, 'No you're wrong. They always write silly things. They start rumours,'" she recalls.

"And Rhett said, 'No, no, it's true. Come home. Now.'"

The family raced to share the news of Michael's death before the media could do it for them. (AAP)

Tina frantically tried to get in touch with her children so she could tell them before they heard it on the news.

"It was such a loss, for many people," she says.

"I remember I couldn't get a flight out until the next day and in the morning I got up and it just hits your brain.

"I hadn't slept much, but reality hits your brain and I got in the shower and for some reason the song about 'Why does the sun keep shining?' just came to me, and that's exactly how I felt."

When Tina thinks about her brother now, she focuses on what a wonderful legacy he left.

"All those fantastic songs and those shows - I mean, I don't remember another Australian band making it like that all over the world," she says.

The proud sister is currently campaigning to have a statue of Michael erected in either Sydney or Melbourne, to commemorate the impact the Australian artist had on the world.

"He deserves it. Look at all the lives he touched. People hear the songs and they remember where they were at the time," she says.

"It's lovely and I'm just sad that he doesn't see his daughter grow up."